The invention disclosed herein relates generally to network monitoring systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to methods and systems for efficiently distributing data relating to events occurring on a network to a large number of users requesting the data.
Maintaining the proper operation of services provided over a network is usually an important but difficult task. Service administrators are often called upon to react to a service failure by identifying the problem that caused the failure and then taking steps to correct the problem. The expense of service downtime, the limited supply of network engineers, and the competitive nature of today's marketplace have forced service providers to rely more and more heavily of software tools to keep their networks operating at peak efficiency and to deliver contracted service levels to an expanding customer base. Accordingly, it has become vital that these software tools be able to manage and monitor a network as efficiently as possible.
A number of tools are available to assist administrators in completing these tasks. One example is the NETCOOL® suite of applications available from Micromuse Inc. which allows network administrators to monitor activity on networks such as wired and wireless voice communication networks, intranets, wide area networks, or the Internet. The NETCOOL® suite includes probes and monitors which log and collect network event data, including network occurrences such as alerts, alarms, or other faults, and store the event data in a database on a server. The system then reports the event data to network administrators in graphical and text based formats in accordance with particular requests made by the administrators. Administrators are thus able to observe desired network events on a real-time basis and respond to them more quickly. The NETCOOL® software allows administrators to request event data summarized according to a desired metric or formula, and further allows administrators to select filters in order to custom design their own service views and service reports.
In a demanding environment, there are many tens or even hundreds of clients viewing essentially the same filtered or summarized event data. The work required to derive such data for a single user is thus replicated for all users. If there are N users, each viewing M items of metric or summary data, the work done by the database is of the order of N*M. This limits the number of clients who can be connected to a single database and the frequency with which such filtered or summarized data can be provided.
There is therefore a need for improved and more efficient techniques for reducing the amount of work that needs to be performed by the database in order to distribute event summary data to a large number of administrator clients.